Pondering the “Pulp Paradox”

This essay reconsiders what genre historian Bradley Schauer terms the “pulp paradox,” that is, the film industry's supposed reluctance to produce sf films because of a fear that doing so would associate the movies with “the less reputable variations of the genre” often associated with pulp literature. It examines this notion by considering a partnership in the 1950s between producer George Pal, major film studio Paramount Pictures, and the most respected of the sf pulps, Astounding Science Fiction. In this period Astounding published a series of articles sponsored by Pal and Paramount designed to help market a group of films: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955). The articles, however, would reveal a level of irony in this industry strategy, for while they initially sought to stress the scientific and technological accuracy to be found these films, they—in concert with the films themselves and other marketing strategies—would also increasingly suggest a kind of pulpiness in the films. During the course of this decade the film industry, with its emphasis on special effects, what Susan Sontag refers to as an “imagination of disaster,” and a sensationalistic and at times lurid imagery, became the real purveyor of a pulp vision

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